Americaca: service economy provides more proof we're fucked, fucked, totally fucked

'Katie Salas, a 24-year-old student at City College of San Francisco, has had 20 jobs in the last 5 years. She has worked in restaurants, shoe stores, clothing stores, bars, Macy’s and a museum. Katie has been forced to work unpaid hours off the clock, was denied vacation days and lied to about receiving commissions that never showed up in her paycheck. While working at the Cheesecake Factory, the pace was so frenzied that breaks were rare. She and fellow employees would fight over who got to clean the bathrooms just so they could sit in the stall and rest. Though City College is a 2-year school, she is in her 5th year because she can only afford to take 2 classes per semester.
Welcome to the new service economy where hundreds of thousands of young people are spending hours making decaf lattes, folding jeans, grilling burgers or unpacking boxes of books and records for minimum wage. It used to be that these jobs were thought of as a summer fling, a right of passage on the way to making it big in the adult world of employment. But in our current economy, which our president seems to think is doing just fine, 7 out of 10 new jobs are service sector jobs like cashiers and baristas. (McDonald’s is the largest youth employer in the nation.) Chains like Starbucks and Wal-Mart and Blockbuster are opening stores at the breathless pace of one every day. Are these the kinds of careers that you took out all those college loans for? Didn’t think so.' Read on.